A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

Many & most moments go by with us hardly aware of their passage. But love & hate & fear cause time to snag you, to drag you down like a spider's web holding fast to a doomed fly's wings. And when you're caught like that you're aware of every moment & movement & nuance.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.